with philology, derivation, illustration.  As a matter of fact there is a good deal that is interesting, even to small minds, in the connection and derivation of words, if briskly communicated.  Most boys are responsive to the pleasure of finding a familiar word concealed under a variation of shape; but this should be conveyed orally.  What is really requisite is that boys should be taught how to read a book intelligently.  In dealing with classical books, vocabulary must be always a difficulty, and I myself very much doubt the advisability in the case of average boys of attempting to teach more than one foreign language at a time, especially when in dealing, say, with three kindred languages, such as Latin, French, and English, the same word, such as spiritus, esprit, and spirit bear very different significations.  The great need is that there should be some work going on in which the boys should not be conscious of dragging an ever-increasing burden of memory.  Let me take a concrete case.  A poem like the Morte d’Arthur, or The Lay of the Last Minstrel, is well within the comprehension of quite small boys.  These could be read in a class, after an introductory lecture as to date, scene, dramatis personae, with perfect ease, words explained as they occurred, difficult passages paraphrased, and the whole action of the story could pass rapidly before the eye.  Most boys have a distinct pleasure in rhyme and metre.  Of course it is an immense gain if the master can really read in a spirited and moving manner, and a training in reading aloud should form a part of every schoolmaster’s outfit.  I should wish to see this reading lesson a daily hour for all younger boys, so as to form a real basis of education.  Three of these hours could be given to English, and three to French, for in French there is a wide range both of simple narrative stories and historical romances.  The aim to be kept in view would be the very simple one of proving that interest, amusement and emotion can be derived from books which, unassisted, only boys of tougher intellectual fibre could be expected to attack.  The personalities of the authors of these books should be carefully described, and the result of such reading, persevered in steadily, would be, what is one of the most stimulating rewards of wider knowledge, the sudden realisation, that is, that books and authors are not lonely and isolated phenomena, but that the literature of a nation is like a branching tree, all connected and intertwined, and that the books of a race mirror faithfully and vividly the ideas of the age out of which they sprang.  What makes books dull is the absence of any knowledge by the reader of why the author was at the trouble of expressing himself in that particular way at that particular time.  When, as a small boy, I read a book of which the whole genesis was obscure to me, it used to appear to me vaguely that it must have been as disagreeable to the author to write it as it was for me to read it.  But if it can be once grasped that books are the outcome of a writer’s interest or sense of beauty or emotion or joy, the whole matter wears a different aspect.